


Pumpkin Pi and Halloween Mischief

by notbeloved07



Series: Science Bros and Holiday Shenanigans [1]
Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Geek Love, Gen, Mad Science, Science Bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:15:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbeloved07/pseuds/notbeloved07
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a drabble featuring Bruce and Tony being huge geeks while having some Halloween fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pumpkin Pi and Halloween Mischief

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for a prompt here:  
> [Science Bros+Pepper, Halloween.](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/11065.html?thread=24747321#t24747321)
> 
> This is me distracting myself from my angstier and longer fic.

Pepper stood with a frown in front of the door to Tony's lab. She had come down to remind Bruce and Tony about the Halloween formal scheduled for the evening, but it sounded like the two miscreant geniuses were having some sort of argument. Even through the mostly sound-proof door, she could make out muffled shouting.

She took a deep breath to steady herself and pushed open the door. She was simultaneously assaulted by the unrelenting odour of fresh pumpkin and the childish shouting of disagreeing geeks.

"Pepper," a pumpkin-tinted Bruce beamed. "Tell Tony he's being ridiculous!"

"Tony, you're being ridiculous," Pepper responded on impulse.

She turned to Bruce. "Ridiculous about...?" she gestured vaguely. The lab was nearly filled to the brim with little pumpkins. There was a line of them around the room, each carved with a single digit. '3', '.', '1', '4', '1', '5', '9', 2', '6', etc. There were dozens of carved pumpkins, and probably hundreds more lined up. At the end of the line of carved ones, Tony, Bruce, Dummy, Butterfingers, and You were carving more, their hands covered in pumpkin juice.

"We're calling the design 'Pumpkin Pi'," Tony smiled. Pepper grimaced at the pun.

"Yeah," Bruce responded, nudging a screen at Pepper with his elbow. "And Tony, here, has decided that the best algorithm--"

"Hey! I didn't say it was the best," Tony pouted, "it's a simple and sufficient method, and the time bottle-neck in this operation isn't the computation of the digits."

"It's the _principle_ of the thing!" Bruce responded. "Anyway, Tony has decided to compute the digits of pi using a trigonometric method that is O n squared, when we could be using a nice, efficient, Gauss-Legendre method that could get the first n digits in time O n log n log log n. It's ludicrous. And Pepper agrees."

"I'm not sure that's what I was agreeing to..." Pepper furrowed her eyebrows.

"Well, you should be," Bruce replied without losing steam, "I mean, if you're going to sacrifice efficiency for code simplicity like that, you might as well use the Buffon Needle Method*. No code necessary."

From the gleam in Tony's eyes when he looked up at Bruce, Pepper knew that it was the wrong thing to say. Bruce had apparently also caught on.

"I didn't mean that, I was just-- That wasn't a suggestion!" Bruce tried to back-track, but it was too late.

"You're a genius!" Tony gasped.

"Dummy, Butterfingers, you're off pumpkin carving duty. Go get all the flat lab probes we can find. Make lines on the ground spaced at the same lengths as the probes and start tossing--"

"Sir," JARVIS interjected. "You know that I am perfectly capable of running a simu--"

"Those two were doing a horrendous job pumpkin carving anyway," Tony waved him off.

"Right," Bruce responded. "And they will make everything better by throwing lab probes around?"

"Hey, you were the one who came up with this ingenious--"

"I just meant--"

Pepper backed out of the room. Tonight's formal could probably manage without Tony Stark, just this once.

 

**Author's Note:**

> *Buffon Needle Method: A way to calculate pi that uses the fact that if you throw a stick of length d on a floor with parallel lines at distance d from each other, the probability that the stick will touch a line is 2/pi. By the Law of Large Numbers, this gives a way to approximate pi doing very little maths.


End file.
